564 



SCIEJ^CE. 



[Vol. VIII., No. 203 



— The value of American scholarship is now 

 very generally and generously recognized abroad. 

 The latest instance of this recognition, and a very 

 important one, is the association of Professors 

 Briggs and Brown of the Union theological sem- 

 inary. New York City, with Canon Driver of Ox- 

 ford in the editorship of a new critical Hebrew 

 lexicon which is being prepared by the delegates 

 of the Clarendon press. 



— The article ' United States ' in the new edition 

 of the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica' will be written 

 by Prof. J. D. Whitney. 



— The fourth annual convention of the modern 

 language association of America will be held at 

 the Johns Hopkins university, Baltimore, on Dec. 

 38, 29, and 30. On the evening of the 28th an ad- 

 dress of welcome will be given by Pres. D. C. Gil- 

 man of the Johns Hopkins university, after which 

 will follow an address by the president of the 

 association, Franklin Carter, president of Wil- 

 liams college. On the 29th the usual two sessions 

 will take place, and in the evening a social enter- 

 tainment will be tendered the convention ; on the 

 30th, session and excursion to Washington. Papers 

 have been reported by several of the leading mod- 

 ern language professors both north and south. 

 Reduced fares on several railways have been ob- 

 tained, and orders for tickets are already in the 

 hands of the secretary. Prof. A. M. Elliott, Johns 

 Hopkins university, Baltimore, for distribution to 

 all those who may wish to avail themselves of 

 these lowered rates. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



*t* Correspondents are requested to be as brief as possible. The 

 writer s name is in all cases required as proof of good faith. 



Electrical phenomena on a mountain. 



I SEND you a brief account of some electric phe- 

 nomena experienced by me last summer on Lone 

 Mountain, a peak of the Gallatin range about thirty 

 miles south-west of Bozeman, Montana. 



In company with Mr. James Walsh, my assistant, 

 I climbed this mountain on Aug. 7, 1886, for the pur- 

 pose of making it a topographic station of my work 

 in that vicinity. It is about eleven thousand feet 

 above sea-level, and higher than any other peak 

 within a radius of at least twenty miles. It stands 

 aloae, being separated from the other high points of 

 the range by low saddles The mornings for two 

 weeks previous had been bright and clear, but after- 

 noon thunderstorms were of daily occurrence. The 

 morning of Aug. 7 was clear as usual ; but about 

 noon clouds had appeared in the west, and by 3 P.M. 

 distant rumbles of thunder were heard, and dense 

 black cloud-masses were sweeping towards us. About 

 this time, as I was working at my plane-table, I 

 heard a peculiar buzzing sound coming from the in- 

 strument, very much as if a large fly or wasp was 



imprisoned beneath one of the plane table sheets. 

 Placing my hand on the table, I received quite a 

 severe shock, and, starting back in surprise, felt 

 another in my partly uplifted right arm. Immedi- 

 ately after the rocks about us began to hum and buzz 

 in a peculiar manner, giving a sort of musical sound, 

 and the hair of our heads, beards, and eyelashes to 

 snap and crackle viciously. This phenomenon was 

 felt with greater intensity in a small spot on the very 

 tops of our heads, was accompanied by a tingling 

 sensation, and at short intervals by slight shocks, 

 which made us cringe involuntarily. On removing 

 our hats, a tuft of hair stood upright over these spots. 

 A shock was received whenever the hand came in 

 contact with the head. 



Placing the instruments in a horizontal position 

 under cover, we descended the mountain about one 

 hundred yards to a point perhaps fifty feet below the 

 summit, and lay down flat. While in this situation, 

 no unpleasant feelings were experienced, although 

 the rocks still continued their musical hum; but the 

 shocks and tingling sensations were immediately felt 

 on raising any portion of our bodies to an upright 

 position. The thunder-storm, accompanied by hail 

 and rain, soon burst upon us, and continued for half 

 an hour, after which the peculiar electric condition 

 of the atmosphere passed away. 



We noticed during the storm that at least eighty 

 per cent of the lightning flashes passed between 

 masses of clouds, and not between the clouds and 

 earth, and that none of these flashes, as determined 

 by the interval between sight and sound, were with- 

 in a mile and a half of the peak we were on. 



The summit of Lone Mountain is a loose mass of 

 broken volcanic rock. There are no large bowlders 

 or projecting points of any kind. M. F. 



Washington, Nov. 24. 



Archeological enigmas. 



Professor Mason's article under the above heading 

 in the last number of Science (viii p. 528) contains a 

 report of remarks by myself which is in some re- 

 spects inaccurate, and it appears to me that the sub- 

 ject is of sufficient importance to command the space 

 necessary for a correction. The formation in which 

 the hearth was found is a shore-deposit of a lake 

 held in the Ontario basin during the final retreat of 

 the ice-sheet. The ice-front then extended as far 

 south as the Adirondack Mountains, and this pre- 

 vented the water from escaping by the St. Lawrence 

 valley. The local relations indicate that the hearth 

 was made during the accumulation of the shore-de- 

 posits, so that its antiquity is somewhat less than 

 that of the culmination of the last general 

 glaciation of north-eastern America. Its antiquity 

 is also sensibly identical with that of the Niagara 

 River ; so that, whenever a satisfactory estimate 

 has been made of the time consumed in the cutting 

 of the Niagara gorge, the age of the hearth will 

 have been determined in years. The estimate of 

 seven thousand years is based upon the hypothesis 

 that the rate of recession of the falls has been uni- 

 form throughout the period of the excavation of the 

 gorge, — an hypothesis not yet sufficiently examined. 



The phrases ' Mr. Gilbert's find ' and ' the Gilbert 

 hearth ' are misleading. The hearth was discovered 

 by Mr. Daniel Tomlinson of Gaines, N.Y. , and our 

 knowledge of it is based entirely upon his oral evi- 

 dence. It was first communicated to the scientific 



